Matt Asay has written another entertaining blog piece on his particular theories of open source economics, and Red Hat’s Michael Tiemann and he have engaged in what is superficially a bit of “Is not!” “Is too!“. Looking a bit deeper, though, it’s not really the pragmatics vs. the Stallmanites, even though that’s how Asay frames it.
Fundamentally, Tiemann is right on the money: a simplistic “supply and demand” view of how prices are set in a market place completely ignores the value that Red Hat offers to its customers.
Let me start this by saying that I really, really want OpenMoko Inc. to be a raging success. With Android, Palm Pre and other “Linux phones” showing pretty how not to do things (jury’s out on N900 for me still), the properly free smartphone is an idea whose time is very definitely here. Sadly, with the freeping creaturism of the phone market and the need to develop both a hardware and software stack simultaneously, that didn’t seem to work out so well, so OM are now going to their backup plan: “WikiReader“.
It’s difficult to tell apart the different factions of the people of Judea these days. On one hand, you have the Boycott Novellers, who post large amounts of “news” heavily rewritten to support their point of view, often with personal attacks on individuals and accompanied by Perez Hilton-style silly drawings. Sad, then, to see the new entrant – Boycott Boycott Novell – apparently chase after their namesakes with a personal attack on a free software developer and, of course, accompanying silly Hiltonesque.
Apologies, but I couldn’t help but comment on this.
I don’t believe it’s broadcast delay. There is a delay there, but it’s of the order of seconds. His waffle at the end is about the same length. I don’t see what difference it would make – it could make the switch happen earlier (e.g., at 1:40 on the video above) but I don’t see any gain. With people analysing the video, it doesn’t really matter where it happens.
That’s apparently what a group of UK inventors are asking for. On the face of it, their arguments are pretty hard to dismiss: if you have a patent, it is extremely costly to “enforce” it and essentially means it’s only open to the big boys.
Sadly, the article doesn’t really talk much about patent quality or the goals of the patent system, and although it brings up the problem of accidental infringement / independent invention, it doesn’t really explore any possible solutions.
For various reasons, I’ve been playing with Clutter over the past week. Rather than the 1.0 release that was announced a little while ago, I’m still on 0.8 – for a number of reasons, but mainly because 1.0 isn’t really available in any distro yet, and because the various language bindings are not yet up to date. LWN has a pretty decent write-up of the 1.0 release (subscriber only for the next week).
Recently, we changed the build system of Bongo – we’ve moved away from autotools. This isn’t to say that autotools is necessarily that deficient, but the new CMake system we’re using is a lot more suitable for our kind of project. This has brought some immediate benefits – much simpler build system, much quicker compiles and installations (‘make install’ in particular is now much faster), and a slightly simpler source tree.
MJ Ray has some interesting thoughts on the recent discussion of BoycottNovell’s lash out at people criticising RMS’ GCDS keynote. For the sake of being open, my reaction to RMS’ speech (which I didn’t see) was that it sounded pretty distasteful: I don’t think there was any sexist intent, but the choice of words was pretty poor.
I think a key problem with BoycottNovell is that it left the lands of “corporate judo” a long time ago: motivating people to spend (or not) their money is one thing (to be applauded – it’s a basic tenet of capitalism, after all), and telling people why they shouldn’t buy a certain company’s products empowers them to make better choices.
Now, I’m not a huge one for using web applications as a means civic communication – I tend to believe that communicating with your representatives is much better done in a public space rather than a private one like Facebook. However, this story (on the face of it) is quite disturbing.
Transport for London recently announced the removal of the N213 night bus service between Croydon and Sutton. For many people, particularly young people going out of a night in Croydon, although this service wasn’t overcrowded it was important.
As I drove to a business planning session (a.k.a. entrepreneur funday) this morning, I heard on the radio that Google had announced their intention to release a consumer operating system. This was interesting news, albeit too brief, and being at this event I wasn’t able to check the news until I got back this evening.
Pretty much the first thing I read was Andrew Savory‘s take on this. Wow, how disappointing.
